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Within the last couple of years, the amount of guests to the site has greately increased. It has increased to a number that PC's servers have issues with supporting.

While some systems are in place to increase server relibilty, the real issue still remains - More connections then the server can handle.

What we need to to cap off these connections - We need to have a set cutoff for when the server can start rejecting connections.

Right now the server limits connections while under heavy use, and provides members with access to the site during such times. A good system to have in place, but it doesn't address the real issue.

What we need is a definite cap on the amount of guest connections. After a set number of guest connections, say... 400?, the site would automatically redirect additional guest connections to a page where the guest would be given 3 diffrient choices - Logging into their PC account, registering a PC account to bypass the connection limit, or just waiting until the number of active guest connections goes down.

This solution isn't perfect I suppose - It would cut down on guest connections but would cause a drastic increase in the number of registered users which would, eventually, lead to the same problems - Way more connections then the server can support.

This would also lead to a drastic increase in the amount of junk accounts - that is, old accounts with absolutely no activity. This could be partially solved though by deleting accounts - Every... hmm... say 3 months, any accounts older then a month and with no posts would be deleted.

Alternatively, I'd suguest that any new accounts require staff approval before it could be used, give staff a chance to run the registration info through a publically avaliable archive of usernames, emails, and ip's known to be used for spam or advertising. Although we have a lot of registrations per day, it's not so high that it would overburden current staff.

Oh I see your line of thought. Sounds like overengineering to me though - one consequence leads to the next, and soon enough the whole system becomes cumbersome. Actually... the guest connections might work by themselves. Sure some people will sign up to meaningless accounts, but putting up barriers like that drains the energy out of people, kind of like institutional barriers stopping certain demographics from achieving in real life. Might be the lesser of the two evils, but we'll need to get numbers for that.

We have almost 300 new members every day. It would take ages to manually approve them. No way that's happening, haha.

The system we have in place right now is based on server load, which is a much better way to handle heavy traffic than just sheer number. It doesn't make sense to reject all connections over x amount because if the existing y connections aren't straining the hardware, there would be no need to reject anything at all. By doing it based on load, the server is literally telling us when it's too busy so that we can throw the message up asking guests to register or come back later.

Definitely appreciate the thought, though. We're working on making the forums load more smoothly, it's just a matter of time. 8)

I don't see how that amount of new members would be hard to manually approve.

Sure, it seems like a large number... But at 300, that's only 12.5 new members per hour.

While the number will vary daily and will undoubtedly increase as time goes on, as of right now it's not to many to overwhelm staff.

I was on staff for a now dead forum and we ended up having to put manual approval in place. We only had 40-50 registrations per day, but it was just two people sorting through them. Then again, the vast majority (Seriously - about 90%) were spam/ad accounts which weren't that hard to spot.

After the modifications I made the forums are now extremely fast and we've experienced no downtime at all. The average server load is around 1.5 which is pretty much exactly where it should be, down from before when it wouldn't be uncommon to see 4+.

After the modifications I made the forums are now extremely fast and we've experienced no downtime at all. The average server load is around 1.5 which is pretty much exactly where it should be, down from before when it wouldn't be uncommon to see 4+.

Probably the amount of seconds it took to load a page on average.. it's great to see that things have been optimized and I have noticed more stable browsing here on PC within the past few days!

EDIT: Well crap, I totally jinxed what I said. Right now PC seems to be loading like how it used to, but I'm not sure if it got reverted or if this slowdown is like the "downtime" of the newer, faster loading times.

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